Richie's Picks: THE ROAR by Emma Clayton, Chicken House, April 2009, 496p.,
ISBN: 978-0-439-92593-8
"I know you're out there somewhere
Somewhere you can hear my voice"
--The Moody Blues
"She leaned forward and whispered, 'If you play the game, I think you will
find Ellie.'"
Ellie disappeared a year ago. The authorities claimed that she had drowned,
pronounced her dead, and even staged a funeral. But her twin brother Mika
knows deep down -- he can feel it -- that she is still out there somewhere.
"The sun was setting over the Atlantic and as it ran like molten gold into
the waves, a girl in a Pod Fighter ripped through the scene, like graffiti
sprayed across a landscape painting, and for a few startled moments, the sun and
the sea trembled."
Readers will know from the start that Ellie is, in fact, alive. Accompanied
by a capuchin monkey named Puck, we watch her flying the Pod Fighter she has
stolen as part of her escape from a year's captivity on a space station
where she has been under the control and tutelage of her abductor Mal Gorman.
Unfortunately, Ellie's escape is unsuccessful.
"'Stop it!' [their mother] said sharply. 'Ellie has been dead for a year
and the sooner you accept it, the sooner we can all move on! It's not fair,
Mika!'
"'No,' Mika said quietly, tears pressing in his eyes. 'It's you that's
wrong. She's not dead. I can feel her.'
"He felt more than he knew. As Ellie's Pod Fighter was shot down and fell
into the dark water of The Shadows, he felt as if he'd received a crushing
blow to his chest. He tried to cry out but there was nothing to cry with, there
was no air in his lungs and he couldn't breath in."
Ellie and Mika have been born into a grossly overcrowded future world where
everyone is holed up behind the massive walls that encircle part of the Earth
. The walls were erected during the Animal Plague. Apparently all of the
Earth's animals went berserk and attacked people several decades before the
twins were born. It is said to have been triggered by an escaped laboratory
rodent. Plants and trees and fields that might have provided habitat and food
for any remaining animals have long ago been eradicated from land and sea,
and so now there is only fake nature.
Beyond The Wall "everything was dead and covered in poisoned dust."
On top of that, the overcrowding has caused society to go double-decker.
Unless you are rich, you live in tiny apartments in a shadow world below the
rich people. It is the wealthy, living upon stilts and up in towers, who are
surrounded by daylight. Everyone else lives -- day and night -- with the
darkness and mold down below.
Ellie and Mika have grown up on the bottomside of London -- a dismal locale
in this incredibly ugly world. It is a place in which -- you get the feeling
-- things are about to get even worse.
Unbeknownst to Mika, it is his sister's kidnapper and captor Mal Gorman who
is behind the Youth Development Foundation and their Fit For Life project in
which all of the twelve- and thirteen-year old children -- this first
generation born since The Plague -- are required to participate. As Mika takes
part
in Pod Fighter simulator competitions (for which he has a unexplainably
uncanny intuitive sense) and other contests pitting him against his peers, he
follows the cryptic, whispered advice of the old woman who believes him about
Ellie -- his counselor/therapist/confidant Helen -- that he should be
cooperative and "play the game" with the hope that it will somehow eventually lead
to
him finding his twin. As he does so, he is fully aware that he and all of
the other participants are being secretly and constantly observed by the
authorities.
Why is it that nobody else seems to be aware of the surveillance? And who
are the horrid Telly Heads who repeatedly appear in Mika's vivid nightmares?
"He had no idea what had happened and felt so shocked, he could do nothing
but watch as the ribbons of blood pumping from his leg transformed into a
cloud of red smoke in the water. Later he remembered thinking that his leg
looked as if it were on fire."
THE ROAR takes surviving one's childhood to a whole new level.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/)
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
_http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks_ (http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks)
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